Edgenuity provides online learning and teacher resources and is used by 75% of U.S. school districts. Over the past five years, the company has seen explosive growth both organically and through acquisitions. In addition to mounting capacity challenges, they also faced gaps in the way they built, tested and deployed applications.
At the beginning of 2020, Edgenuity’s primary focus was migrating their existing data center to AWS by the end of the year. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the company needed to scale from supporting 500,000 connections to 5 million, making the data center migration critical. Corey Johnston, Manager of Cloud Engineering, Edgenuity said, “we didn’t have the capacity on-premises to handle the load and hence had to migrate majority of our core LMS applications to Amazon.”
Edgenuity adopted the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack to streamline the process of building, delivering, and securing applications. The company was able to accelerate cloud migration and standardize services and APIs to support a hybrid environment. Adoption of agile delivery processes were possible which made deployments more transparent to developers and automate creation of build and deployment pipelines. The adoption of Chef for security automation and compliance auditing has enabled Edgenuity to ensure environments stay in sync and meet compliance needs.
Corey added “Chef has made our migration to AWS super easy. We were able to take what was built and move it to the cloud. Now we are rearchitecting as we have time and are super happy with the progress we’ve made.”
Edgenuity was able to:
- Reduce deployment times from 4 days to under 3 hours
- Lower the number of DevOps tools in use by 30%
- Decrease the time ops spent supporting development to less than 5%
Learn more about the challenges faced by Edgenuity and what was done differently to overcome them. Read the case study.